Joe the War Correspondent?

The Ohio man, who gained notoriety during the U.S. presidential campaign after asking Barack Obama about his tax plan, is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for a conservative Web site called pjtv.com.

Dubbed Joe the Plumber by McCain’s campaign, Samuel Joe Wurzelbacher was held up as an example of an American worker who would be hurt economically by Obama’s election.

Wurzelbacher said he’ll spend 10 days covering the fighting and explaining why Israeli forces are mounting attacks against Hamas.

The Telegraph adds a pertinent detail from one of Mr. Wurzelbacher’s campaign appearances on behalf of Senator John McCain:

At one stop on the campaign trail, Mr. Wurzelbacher agreed with a McCain supporter who asked if he believed a vote for Mr. Obama was a vote for the death of Israel.

That incident, recorded on video, led to what an editorial in The New York Times described as “five painful live-on-Fox minutes the next day,” when the Fox News anchor Shepard Smith “repeatedly asked Mr. Wurzelbacher what evidence he had to back up that charge. Mr. Wurzelbacher refused to answer. He said it was up to Mr. Smith’s viewers to figure out why he, Joe the Plumber, thought Mr. Obama was a menace to Israel.”

Here is the video of that interview on Fox, which contains the clip of Mr. Wurzelbacher agreeing that an Obama presidency would mean “death to Israel.”

The conservative Web site that is sending Mr. Wurzelbacher to Israel, Pajamas TV, is part of the conservative blogging group Pajamas Media. Pajamas TV currently features an interview in which Mr. Wurzelbacher talks to two prominent conservative bloggers, Glenn Reynolds and Michelle Malkin.

On the Web site of Pajamas Media, the company’s chief executive officer, a screenwriter named Roger L. Simon, writes that he is delighted by the objections some professional journalists have already expressed to the plot of what he calls “Mr. Smith Goes to Jerusalem.”

Nora O’Donnell of MSNBC — herself a MA in international relations, lahdeedah – fairly frothed at the mouth at the prospect of the unqualified Joe having the temerity to report news in a foreign land. Those hipoisie over at Gawker weren’t too charitable either.

Evidently, a lot of people are annoyed that Joe’s fifteen Warhol minutes aren’t quite over yet. Or perhaps they’re threatened that a common man can be a reporter simply by asking common sense questions — no Columbia J-school degree required. (Hemingway didn’t have one. He didn’t even go to college, as I recall.) But the larger question is the role of expertise in general. Of course, experts are valuable, but so are those who ask the seemingly too obvious questions of the supposedly uninformed — dumb questions that can end up having more value for the public than all the experts combined. Sometimes, anyway.

In any case, Joe will be appearing on PJTV Thursday for an interview before leaving and then on to Israel where he will meet up with our Richard Landes and Danny Seaman, Israel’s GPO (Government Press Office) director. He will have a local camera crew with him and decide for himself where he wants to go — but some destinations under discussion are the West Bank, Bethlehem (to investigate the conditions of Christians there), Southern Israel where the missiles are falling and, of course, as close as he can get to the Gaza border. I must say I find amusing the idea of Joe lined up with all the telephoto cameras at that Gaza media overlook with Cooper, Amanpour, et al. It’s certainly the stuff of Frank Capra.

Update A colleague here at The Times points out that the people Pajamas TV’s newest foreign correspondent will be meeting at the start of his reporting trip, Richard Landes and Danny Seaman, have strong credentials as critics of the way a previous stage of the conflict in Gaza was reported.

Mr. Landes is a leading proponent of the theory that a French television news report from 2000, about a twelve-year-old Palestinian boy named Muhammad al-Dura who was shot and killed during a gun battle between Israeli soldiers and Palestinian demonstrators in Gaza, was staged. The Lede touched upon the controversy over these television images last year, and James Fallows has written about Muhammad al-Dura’s death and blogged about the parts Mr. Landes and Mr. Seaman have played in furthering the argument of the media critics who call the footage of the young boy and his father under fire a “Pallywood” production.

On another matter, several readers have raised the question of whether Mr. Wurzelbacher, who, of course, turned out not to have a plumber’s license, is really qualified to be a foreign correspondent. Clearly the people at a company calling itself Pajamas Media are open to the possibility that amateur journalists, even those working from home and not finding it necessary to dress for work, might be as well positioned as professionals to report the news. Close readers may also have picked up a bit of skepticism in the way this blog post was framed, but we should acknowledge that, as Louis Menand recently wrote in an article in The New Yorker on the early days of the Village Voice, in many ways it is in fact easier to qualify as a journalist than as a plumber. “Journalism,” Mr. Menand reminds us, “is a profession entirely by self-description. You do not need a degree, license or credential to be a journalist.”

Will he weigh in on the history of the conflict, citing reputable sources, or on the immanence of the Rapture, referring to specific biblical verses/ Or will he merely stand and ask us, the viewers, to guess what he’s thinking is happening? Will he correct Hamas’s false interpretation of the Qur’an, Israel’s constitutionally inappropriate restrictions on free speech, or the misstatements of the MSM? Or will he merely stand and ask us, the viewers, to guess why we’re watching him at all?

Just shows how far the blogging notion can take us. Does anyone really believe he will uncover real facts? As opposed to his own predictable opinions — unrelated to any objective and ascertainable reality? Of course not.

I think we’ll look back on the G. W. Bush years as the period when the Onion disclaimer — “Not an Onion story/headline” — supplanted the Dave Barry oath — “I swear I am not making this up” — as the acid test of veracity.

Wow, so if I want to become a journalist covering foreign affairs I should drop out of college, not pay taxes, and become an uninformed, meaningless and pretentious spokesperson for an equally corrupt presidential candidate (Palin 12?). And by pledging blind allegiance to Israel J the P is somehow a reporter? To investigate the conditions of Christians living in Bethlehem– yes, I’m sure there communities have been demolished in the past two weeks.

Well, considering the pathetic performance of the “real” media in this last election why not? “Media Standards” is one of those oxymoron things. Journalism is nothing but a cake major that athletes take. Somehow the last 40 years’ worth of journalism grads think their jobs are to “change the world” instead of reporting the what/where/when/etc. and letting people make up their own minds from the facts. I guess journalists just project their own stupidity onto their audience and assume we can’t think for ourselves.

The idea of someone from the NYT of all places sneering down from on high is particularly laughable.

Well, if David Letterman can elevate storekeepers and his mother to national journalists, and Jimmy Kimmel can elevate his uncle and Guillermo to national journalists, it makes perfect sense for Joe the Unlicensed Plumber to be an international journalist.

I’ve read Hemingway. Hemingway is a “friend” of mine. Joe, you’re no Hemingway. Hemingway could string a subject, verb, and object together. I bet Joe’s English skills are as strong as his plumbing skills. But if he wants to humiliate himself, who are we to stop him?

[NYT Ed.:Well, Tom, interestingly, as Louis Menand recently pointed out in an article on the early days of the Village Voice, in many ways it is in fact easier to qualify as a journalist than as a plumber: “Journalism is a profession entirely by self-description. You do not need a degree, license or credential to be a journalist.”]

Collateral Damage….Collateral Damage…Friendly Fire….Friendly Fire…or perhaps he will just fix a pipe bomb. Oh no…we learned during the election that he’s not qualified as a plumber either. Perhaps he’s just figured out a patriotic way to avoid some more taxes.

Journalism takes less skill than fixing plumbing; I’m sure he’ll be as good as anyone from the soon-to-be-bankrupt Times.

[NYT Ed.: You’d be surprised at how much skill really is involved, in at least some forms of journalism, even if it is not visible to readers. This inability to differentiate between the kind of writing that people do from second-hand reports and what is done first-hand on the ground by the best reporters is sort of like saying all music is formulaic garbage, and making no distinction between a pop star, a jazz musician and Mozart.]

He better keep his head down. You do not want to be the attention grabber in a war zone. He’s not the story. I hope someone tells him that. If he gets iced, the people who sent him over are worse than fools and attention grubbers. This is no joke.

Shrug. A “nation of shopkeepers” stopped the first great european tyrant & many great PJs came from trailer trash level backgrounds. He might do well. He might do poorly. Let the guy live or die based on how he hangs his own petard.

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